Well, the election results are in, and the Twitterverse is full of tweets in relation to it in New Zealand. Every trending topic is about the election except one (which is about a boxing match).

(As an aside, what do you think of boxing? Is it a sport? I don’t think it is, and I don’t get why people even want to watch it. And look at what it does to people! The head injuries they sustain are so awful. I really don’t think there should be any celebration of people beating each other up either.)

The result of the election isn’t ideal. Special votes haven’t been counted yet and the result could still change. At the moment the result is National – 58, Labour – 45, New Zealand First – 9, Greens – 7, ACT – 1.

Thus, neither major party can form a government without the support of New Zealand First. NZ First is lead by an egotistical populist named Winston Peters (that’s him in the pic). He will play the two biggest parties off against the other, forcing ideas that most people didn’t vote for into the mix. The current government is lead by the National Party, and they only need one other party to form a coalition. The majority of NZers think that the biggest party should get first shot at forming a government.

Labour though will be doing all they can to convince everyone that’s not the case. However, a Labour + Greens + NZ First coalition has only a one seat majority (61-60). Peters already has a reputation as an unreliable coalition partner. He has been the cause of a lot of trouble over his long career, and he will not balk even at going so far as forcing an election if he sees fit. So if that’s the government we get, it may not be that stable.

Another bad thing about the election is that both the Maori Party and United Future are gone. I expected United Future to be gone, but not the Maori Party. Both parties are excellent centrist parties with honourable MPs and they’re all a big loss. The election was very close between the centre left and the centre right and people tended to vote for National or Labour to ensure their preference had the best chance of forming a government. (It’s what I did.) Therefore, the smaller parties lost a lot of votes this election. In addition a scandal showed that the Greens are as corrupt as every other political party and lost half their supporters because of that.

The loss of the Maori Party also means Maori have to rely on Maori MPs within other parties to voice their interests and that doesn’t always work well. There are plenty of Maori MPs – significantly more than their proportion in the population – but their voices tend to be overcome by the overall interests of their parties. All parties make a point of consulting with iwi (tribes), but it’s not the same as having a separate voice. The Maori Party has made significant gains for Maori during their time in parliament. People don’t realize just how much they do for Maori because it’s been done quietly as a coalition partner with National for the last nine years.

Human Rights Tweets

The bravery of this young man astounds me. Doing this when he is not much more than a child is so impressive.

I have a bit of a problem with the question in the tweet though, “What kind of protest has ever been acceptable.” (For a start, “effective” and “acceptable” are quite different things.) However, in my opinion, violent protest is never acceptable. For example, though I agree with what Antifa stands for I will not support them because I oppose their methods. I also don’t think shouting down speakers so they can’t talk is acceptable. Freedom of speech must reign supreme. We have to have the open debate.
(Via Ann German.)

This is a recurring theme for me, and I’m glad to hear Hillary Clinton speaking about it. Sexism is so embedded in our society, many don’t even notice it. I remember putting a Jesus and Mo cartoon about sexism in one of my posts, and one of my most liberal commenters didn’t get it.

11 Responses to “My Picks for Top Tweets: 24 September 2017”

Should I be worried that the first thing that entered my head on seeing the “Tikiman beetle” was that it is a shield bug, not a beetle? It is the man faced shield bug, Catacanthus incarnatus. But maybe there is still some hope for me, I had to look up the binomial. http://eol.org/pages/3685880/overview, encyclopedia of life on man faced shield bugs.

I love the orangutan cracking up at the magic trick.

And my sympathies over Winston Peters. We’ve got a Senate full of equally shallow, egotistical, non-representative prats. Their disproportionate influence is having a nasty effect on Australian government. I don’t imagine Peters will be any better.

So much to disagree with here. Sorry but I fail to see how the Greens’ woes showed them to be as corrupt as every other party. If Metireia had been a National party MP she’d be in Paula Bennett’s position. (Nobody can report on Paula Bennett’s past because it’s injuncted to the max.) The Todd Barclay story is a worse case of corruption and involves a clear demonstration of the Prime Minister lying to Parliament, lying to his party and lying to the press. Yet it doesn’t seem to have cost him any support at all. In my opinion Blinglish has lost any moral authority since his (and Dickhead Joyce’s) decision to campaign on proven lies. It’s a pity, Bill used to be the one Nat politician with a decent amount of integrity but he’s ditched that to grasp to power.

The problem I have with Meteria Turei is not so much what she did, but that she thought it should have no effect. If any National MP had done what she did there would have been a widespread scream for his/her resignation. In the past even the suggestion of wrongdoing has seen MPs from all parties stand down, and they’ve resigned if it’s proven true. Turei thought it should make no difference whatsoever – that her confession was enough. It seems clear to me that’s why the Greens lost so much support.

As for the Bill English thing, I’ve never been able to work out exactly what happened there. Barclay is gone, and so he should be. He clearly isn’t fit to be an MP. There was a gag order controlling what English said which confuses the matter and I think that’s a big part of the problem. He had been friends with the woman concerned for years and we don’t know what they talked about or whether it’s relevant but the Police know and are okay with it. He did lose public support over it, but what got him through was his strong reputation for integrity which both colleagues and opponents in the House agree he has. In all the coverage I saw, no one was able to definitively say what he did wrong – it was all allusion. That seems to be the difference. “A bad look” as Corin Dan always called it, and it definitely was, but there doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong on English’s part.

Personally, I’d always seen the Greens as a party of integrity and I found the way they handled Turei’s revelations extremely disappointing. She herself was quite clear that she didn’t think it should make a difference. It felt like she thought the rules shouldn’t apply to her. It also seemed like new things kept coming out – that her confession wasn’t full and frank. She left out the stuff she couldn’t justify, such as that concerning her mother and her child’s father.

So you’re saying the whole party is corrupt because you think Turei was a bit disingenuous? You’ve got to distinguish between Turei and her party here. I agree that they handled the fallout badly but you’d be more correct if you called that incompetent rather than corrupt. Everything happened out in the open.

I feel like people hold different political parties to different standards depending on whether they like the party. What Turei did was wrong, and she is the only one tainted by that. If the Greens had handled her situation the same way they would demand of a party they didn’t like, I wouldn’t be criticizing the whole party. The Greens thought she could still be a minister in a Labour/Greens government as well as remain as co-leader. They wouldn’t have accepted that from a National MP in the same situation. Then she said she wouldn’t be a minister but would remain co-leader but she didn’t think it was fair she couldn’t be a minister. When she eventually withdrew from the co-leadership she said it was because her family was getting a hard time. She still thought she should be able to carry on as uf nothing happened. There was still no personal insight she was wrong. The party supported whatever stance she took.

Personally, I was very disappointed in the party. I don’t vote for them, but I thought they were better than that.

I was also trying to make the point that they mostly change colour, but they’re still ON the trees.

Having said that, I grew up in a city that was really windy in the autumn, and until I moved away I’d never experienced the beauty of an autumn with all the beautiful colours. The leaves were gone from the trees as soon as they changed colour. I suppose it would have been fair to call it “fall” there.

I love the laughing orangutan, but when I look at the footage on youtube, there is no audio of the orangutan’s laughter, and the orangutan was behind glass, so one hears only humans laughing. Yet, the sound on the video above seems to me to fit the visuals. No matter, it is obvious that the orang is tickled by the trick.

The colors produced by the F22 in yesterday’s post were a treat for my eyes. So beautiful. And if I could embroider, I’d make an embroidered pillow with that “wish upon a star” quote. Dead stars. Dead dreams. That says it all.